A Church I can love too.

Follow the link above. A great article about the boys club that we attend on Sundays.

I was at a meeting recently. Someone prayed for the "holy father and his persecution by the media." My heart broke. Where is the reconciliation? Where is the need for the powerful to plead for forgiveness? Where is the honesty? I cannot get into this too much. It is too emotional, too enraging. Too much. My heart will break, my fingers will punch through the keyboard.

My prayer, "For all victims of sexual abuse and abuse of power. For their healing, that they may know their holiness, that the presence of Christ may come to them in their brokeneness."

Comments

Eugh, Rachel, I am so sorry to hear that... it's still absolutely stunning to me that there are some people who are so afraid of the crumbling of their safe world that they find it easier to see persecution everywhere than to face the pain of the truth... well, I guess it's not that stunning.... the truth is really damn painful.

I was really overwhelmed by this the other day, and all I could think to do was read the prophets... not the comforting Isaiah "voice calling out in the wilderness" Advent prophets, but the hard, the angry, Jeremiah and parts of Habakkuk ... How long, O Lord, will I cry out for help and you will not listen? Or cry to you "Violence!" and you will not save?

And I wound up thinking... even if it were true that all of the press were motivated by anti-Catholicism (which is clearly false, but even if it were), if the prophets could see the hand of God at work in the Babylonians, in the Assyrians... and of course I don't believe in a God who rains down punishment and wrath, and I will argue to the death with anyone who wants to see in misfortune and suffering the hand of God... but it gave me a moment of empathy with those hard texts... a moment where I thought, "I can see how things could get so bad you almost cry out for the destruction of something you love... how external destruction could seem a mercy compared to this long internal cannibalism..."